Despite the fact that we were hoping to travel from one set of Pacific islands to another, no airline has ever optimised their routes to make it simple to travel from the Galápagos to Japan, and the Pacific is big enough that this is not a trivial journey.
We won’t spend ages on this, because I have three weeks of Japan to write about, but the journey was neither short nor simple.
From the Galápagos we boarded a morning flight back to the Ecuadorian mainland, which made an intermediate stop at Guayaquil. I’d never heard of Guayaquil before but it’s a coastal port city and the biggest city in Ecuador, and we got more time there than we expected. On landing, our plane developed a fault, so we were taken in to the airport. Our total interaction with Guayaquil was to buy a sandwich and a drink before being put on a different plane and arriving in Quito with just two hours’ delay.
In Quito we had six hours to kill, and check in wasn’t even nearly open for our flight, so we wheeled our luggage to a land-side lounge where we sat and had terrible free drinks and snacks for a bit. Then when check in opened we presented ourselves first in the queue.
The kindly attendant was bemused by our itinerary and delighted that we were on honeymoon, and after much tapping at her screen replaced our online check-in seat choices for the Tokyo leg of the journey with better seats that had more leg room.
We then went to an airside lounge and were just getting stuck in to some complimentary drinks when our blood ran cold at the sound of our names being called over the public address system. We were being called to the gate. Were we late? Had we done something wrong? We ran to our gate to discover that no, our flight wasn’t even nearly ready to board yet, that was ages away, but our bags and boarding cards all bore the ominous letters SSSS which means we’d been “randomly” selected for additional security screening. Please step into this holding pen behind the gate and a security officer will rummage you shortly.
“Randomly” rang a bit hollow. We were flying from Quito to Houston and then from Houston to Tokyo. Nobody does that and it must have flagged us on whatever security screening system the airline uses. My guess is that our check in lady saw that we’d been marked with the dreaded SSSS when we checked in and upgraded our seats as a sort of payback for the inconvenience.
We were last to be checked, after the security staff had screened a number of other people, stopped to have a chat and look at videos on each others’ phones, and then slowly searched a lady with four carry-on bags seemingly all full of suspicious products. We then had to be patted down and all our carry-on items emptied from our bags completely. Every electrical item had to be switched on and demonstrated to prove it wasn’t a dummy with a hidden compartment. While this happened we watched the plane board in its entirety. At the end, when we had re-packed our bags and we could finally go, the steward said “everyone is waiting, you’re last to board, so you should hurry up.” Yeah, no worries, sorry to have kept you.
A five-hour overnight flight took us to Houston, where we arrived sleep deprived and didn’t know which way we were facing. We queued for an eternity to get through US immigration, despite having no intention of leaving the airport, and had our $80 visas checked, despite having no intention of leaving the airport. Then we had breakfast and brushed our teeth and waited for our connection, and in that time I took this one photograph, which represents my only experience of North America. It is one of the four continents of our honeymoon but we were only there for about four hours.
Our third flight was a fourteen-hour marathon but it was easily the best flight we’ve had so far. Our Quito check in lady did us a real favour by getting us the extra legroom aisle where economy meets business class, and the flight was very undersubscribed so nobody else shared our row and we could stretch out. Best of all, this was an early morning departure from Houston, but travelling west it arrived in Tokyo mid afternoon. To our delight the cabin lights were dimmed and everyone went to sleep, so we could actually get some rest before arriving – something we’d struggled to do on our redeye flight in to Houston.
And then we arrived, slightly dazed, in Tokyo; we navigated the myriad tiny paper forms that had to be completed at every stage of passing through the airport’s immigration and customs facilities; an unbelievably cheerful taxi driver collected us up; and suddenly… we were in a whole new country and a whole new continent. We had arrived in Japan.
Next time: Tokyo!